A Day In the Life of a Webmaster: Stupid Link Requests

It is rare that a day goes by without a website link request arriving in my mailbox. Link exchanges can be good for a website, but they can also be bad, if you’re not careful.

The world is still full of stupid people who think only of themselves. Why would a quality website link to another quality website and accept a link from a garbage link farm, in return?

Usually, I ignore these stupid requests and delete the message, but this one got my attention – it was doubly stupid – because they offered me a link from an IP address website.

Stupid webmasters waste their time and mine, asking for this type of link campaign and they do a disservice to any site that trades with them. The only reason they do it is to gain ranking in Google. Google will soon realise this is a three way link scheme and it will be completely discounted, negating the value the link partners were hoping for.

Unsuspecting webmasters can get themselves into more trouble than they can imagine.

Trading Quality Links

In general, I recommend not trading links at all. The only caveat to that is if the links are “nofollow” links, that don’t pass pagerank, and then they are really ads. This allows the two sites to help each other, by sending visitors to each other, but doesn’t try to manipulate pagerank, which it would if the links were followed.

The moral of the story is to only trade links with quality websites that make sense for you to trade with – sites in your general niche or related to your audience, and make them “nofollow.” Don’t give or accept triangulated links from a third site, a link farm or a buried links page. Give – and accept – only quality, hand crafted “nofollow” links.

Rejecting Link Requests

The best thing for a webmaster to do is to ignore stupid link requests, but I was tired and decided to respond. This was my response to this dummy:

Hello J.

Are you nuts?

Let me get this right.

You want me to give you a quality link to boost your site in the search engines and in return, you will give me a pile of steaming camel dung that has worse than no value, it has negative value.

It was a hard decision, but I have decided to pass on your offer.

Alan

Their message to me:

J. L. wrote:

Dear webmaster,

I hope you are doing fine.

I came across your website https://newsblaze.com/ and would like to propose a link exchange between https://newsblaze.com/ and xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.Com

Alan Gray is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of NewsBlaze Daily News and other online newspapers. He prefers to edit, rather than write, but sometimes an issue rears it’s head and makes him start hammering away on the keyboard.

Content Expertise

Alan has been on the internet since it first started. He loves to use his expertise in content and digital marketing to help businesses grow, through managed content services. After living in the United States for 15 years, he is now in South Australia. To learn more about how Alan can help you with content marketing and managed content services, contact him by email.

Alan has a fascination with shooting video footage and video editing, so watch out if he points his Canon 7d in your direction.